1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a leaderboard system and method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In conventional videogame systems, users can compare their game scores with other users in several ways. A common means of providing a comparison is to generate a so-called leaderboard, which shows the top N ranked players of a game according to some performance metric, such as overall score, shortest lap, achievements in a game level or the like.
Typically the top N players are taken from a global list managed by a network provider associated with the game or with the console upon which the game is run. To make the leaderboard more relevant to the individual, this global list may first be filtered, for example to only select the top N players from a list of friends of a user maintained by the network provider. However, this assumes that a user has a sufficient number of friends playing the relevant game.
Alternatively, the top N players may be taken from a list of players sharing a particular game server or server cluster. Consequently the leaderboard may then correspond to a physical location, such as Europe or the United States, or a virtual location such as ‘Server 56’. However, this still does not provide a very personal experience for any particular user.
With the advent of GPS positioning within videogame consoles, a further alternative is to rank users who are currently within a certain distance of each other, to create an ad-hoc local ranking. However, as the point of a leaderboard is to commemorate a good performance, the ephemeral nature of such ad-hoc rankings is unsatisfactory.
Consequently there is scope to improve over the present state of the art.